A splintering pain ricochets up the back of my neck. I can’t wait. I palm the side of this woman’s face like a lover might and send electricity skittering all over her skin. Her mouth parts and she tries to scream, but I quickly bring her face into my shoulder in a hug while I continue to blitz her with a pain that must be excruciating.
Footsteps alert me to the presence of humans. I glance left and see an older Korean couple walking past. They smile at us. I give them my best shy smile back and top it off with a wink. They gigglelike schoolchildren as they shuffle past us, and we are alone again. How lovely.
I pull her away from my jacket by the hair and see the tears pooling in her eyes. “What are you ... What did you ... I just came to warn you! If you really are serious about Monika, you should know she’s only interested in her fancy little cameras. All she’s ever wanted is to do her little art projects that everyone seems to love her for. She doesn’t date seriously. She’s just a huge whore. She fucked my boyfriend in high school.”
Ah. And there it is. A jealousythispetty could have only been born from something that happened years ago.
I retreat just a little, giving this woman space—this woman whose name, for the life of me, I can’t remember. I recoil my gifts from her skin and straighten, or at least I try to, but my arm, my hands, my fingernails ... it’s all pain. My eyelids are burning. I can’t quite see straight.
Blinking quickly, I hiss, “Let me make this abundantly clear since you seem to be harboring delusions that I care about anything that comes out of your pretty mouth.” I smile at her. She winces, her legs shaking at the knees. “I don’t care if she fucked your mother and every other member of your family. I don’t care if she dates men or women or those that exist in the valley between. I don’t care if she wants to leave me. I don’t care if she wants to have a threesome or a full fucking orgy.
“Monika doesn’t get to choose.Idecide when Monika leaves.Idecide who Monika fucks, and for now, she fucks me and only me because I’m a selfish bastard and I don’t share the things that belong to me. Monika ismine. For now ...” I have no idea when I decided these things, but whether they’re true or bullshit, I don’t take them back. They need to be said to this annoying creature.
I straighten the silk lapel of my tuxedo and watch the woman melt. She lands on her ass on the ground beneath me, looking so stupid and small with little dewy tears trailing down her cheeks. “B-b-but why? What makes her so special?” she asks, sounding like the high schooler she once was, having the same conversation she did with her cheatingboyfriend.Grow up, get over it,I’d tell her. But she’s human, dense, committed to focusing on the unimportant.
And yet, her question does stir something inside me. Something softer than the headache radiating through my temples and shooting down the back of my neck, damn near immobilizing me. Instead of pain fluttering through my chest, I feelpleasure. The softest fluttering of butterfly wings brushing against all my organs.
“Because she isn’t full of bullshit,” I answer the woman, though she doesn’t need an answer. The pain in my head spikes. “Because she interests me.”
The pain comes again, this time for my legs and ass, which clenches up like I’m trying to keep in a tremendous shit. I should stop talking now, but I don’t. I’m so determined to lob the head off the beast that I fail to realize the only beast I’m fighting here is me. “Because she’s the most talented woman I’ve ever met.” The words are out before I can stop them. They are the strangest words I’ve ever said. My head. It must be whatever’s happening to my head. The pain is ... sensational. Damn near resplendent.
I need this irritating woman to get the fuck away from me before I promise to meet her at her hotel later and instead make a deal with Bia and the Meinad to let them have their way with her in the hotel’s back alley. That is, if I survive this.
I stagger back, clutching my head between my hands while the woman on the floor says, “You’re an asshole.” These are the words Iexpectto hear from humans.How dare you talk to me like this? Who do you think you are?Drivel drivel drivel. But instead of punctuating her asinine statement with any of those pitiful follow-ups, she screams. Literally screams. And damn, would she make a fantastic final girl in a horror flick.
“What?” I snarl, but I feel something happening. I feelterrible. My head. My fucking headache ...
“Your head!” she shrieks again.
“Taranis?”
A soft voice startles me. I look to the right. Monika stands there, and my whole focus is attuned to the stricken look on her face as she lifts her phone. “Let me call—”
“Don’t fucking ...”Call anyone,is what I would have said—I don’t need her reporting me to the COE for electrocuting her fake friend. Only, I start to wonder if that’s what she was talking about when my vision starts to go dark and my body collapses.
I hit the hard tile on one knee, my headache fuckingsplintering. It feels like I’m being stabbed repeatedly by the Meinad in the skull over and over. I close my eyes as my hands fall out to the sides to steady myself. The tile in this hallway beneath the light of so many lanterns is ice cold. I try to use it to ground me, to remember how to breathe, but strangely all I can smell is Monika’s deep spiced-and-smoky-honey-scented perfume, and all I can hear is her voice in my head saying,Please.
Then several images slap me in quick succession.
The first, a glimpse of a small monster with hideous, scarred skin, bright-white eyes, and horns spiraling up over his head, ending in points that are deadly sharp.
The second, a blazing flash of light.
The third, the feeling of my entire body being thrown back and forth, sending pangs of agony shooting through all my limbs, making me feel like I’m being torn apart.
And the last, a dark, demonic voice whispering terrible things in a language I’ve never heard spoken before but somehow understand:Kill them all. Every last human.
I’m blitzed by rolling pictures, too many to track, that form a patchwork quilt in my skull, a maze that I follow and follow down, down, descending into the final ring of hell before I’m able to cross the divide and fight my way to freedom.
When reality resettles around me, I’m shocked to find myself in the exact same position I’d been in. I’d have expected to be lying flat out on my back, drooling like an idiot. Instead, I’m still kneelingthere, listening to the voice of an actual idiot shrieking at me in her annoying falsetto.
“Oh my God, it happened! Oh my God, did it ... Was it because of me?” Bright laughter tingles through my pain, pulling me fully back into the present.
I lift my head, surprised that I can at all with how heavy it feels. It’s like my skull was crushed between anvils or like I got sat on by a whale. I roll my shoulders back and blink my eyes open, though I can’t see shit. Everything’s blurry, but I rise to stand anyway. A dizzy spell causes me to reach out with both hands. One of them lands on a skinny little arm. The other lands on a shoulder that’s softer than the silk she wears. I turn toward the latter.
“Easy,” the voice says to me. It’s deep for a woman’s, and grounding. I find it soothing, and despite the tremors still rolling through my body in waves that recede like the tide, I’m able to exhale almost all my panic. Even some of the pain, too, subsides.
“Monika?” I say, blinking at her fuzzy outline.
